Additional analysis is necessary to confirm the planetary nature of the over 12,000 remaining TCE objects. Many of these transits signals are expected to be false alarms, specially for long periods objects such as those orbiting within the habitable zone (HZ).

Nearly 1,500 TCE objects match our standard criteria for potentially habitable planets (planet size 0.4 — 2.6 Earth radii orbiting within the empirical HZ), but only about 20% of them might turn out to be real planets, still a large number. Nevertheless, this analysis provides some upper limits to interesting objects in the Kepler TCE sample (Table 2).

Table 1. Summary statistics of some planetary and stellar characteristics of the new 16,285 TCE list.